Comment on “Intimate Matters after Twenty-Five Years”

As I listened to the outstanding papers presented at this state-of-the-field panel, I felt strongly that the history of sexuality in America is in very good hands. Each speaker provided a road map for my own reading and teaching, as well as delectable food for thought. I have just a few comments about the framework for the book, our collaboration, teaching Intimate Matters, and where to go from here.

As John D’Emilio pointed out, our book grew out of a literature review that I began at a time when sexuality was becoming a focus of scholarship within the new women’s history. Our interpretive framework, which emphasizes the separation of reproduction and sexuality, clearly reflects this origin. Another incubator, though, was the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, in which both John and I participated during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this group we read Foucault, explored community politics, and grappled with the conservative backlash against gay rights, all of which influenced our explorations of sexual regulation and sexual politics in the past. In a sense the book project was a quest for a broader mapping that could incorporate both the feminist and the gay histories that we were writing, reading, and beginning to teach.

Along with the respective professional dilemmas we faced at the time we took on this task, I want to acknowledge a more personal impetus for the project. Collaborating on Intimate Matters provided a great vehicle for sustaining a long-distance friendship. The semiannual writing and revising retreats that John and I took for several years combined intense work with scenic side trips in northern California and North Carolina. Since our graduate student days at Columbia, we had been talking about sexuality and politics. These retreats allowed us to continue those conversations after we both, at last, had secure teaching jobs.

Hearing speakers and audience members at the Organization of American Historians panel testify to the influence of Intimate Matters brought home for me the reality that a generation of budding scholars has actually read the book! Over the years so many teachers have mentioned that they found it very useful for writing lectures but didn’t assign it that I sometimes wondered where our sales came from. I had begun to teach a discussion course on the history of sexuality while we were writing the book, but I have to admit that I only rarely assigned it as a required text in that class, since it seemed redundant with the other readings and my overviews. I know that John solves this problem by assigning the whole book early in the course and then digging into the specialized literature. I have assigned chapters in graduate colloquia, and I advise students to comb through it thoroughly for orals preparation. Having completed this third edition, I plan to rethink how to employ chapters to provide context in survey classes, as well as in the history of sexuality course.

My final reflection concerns the changing scope of the history of sexuality. We conceived our book at a time when questions of identity, community, and politics pervaded our own sexual discourse. With each new revision we have noted the growing diversity of the field, as more scholars take race and region, for example, into account. And we have noted the persistent gaps, which John refers to in his comments. Listening to the papers on this panel, and especially to Cynthia Blair’s comments about black women’s sexual subjectivity, I was struck by another challenge. To borrow a current literary paraphrase, what do we talk about when we talk about “sex” in history? Much of the time it seems that our subject is everything except sex as act, behavior, experience. Sex stands for so much in our culture, and we have learned that a wide range of historical sources allows us to ask questions about sexual meanings, regulation, and politics. How, though, can we think more creatively about studying the practice of sex? How could we listen more closely to our historical subjects and then allow them to...